Friday, 2 October 2015

H & G Simonds acquisitions

I am indeed continuing my Courage theme. Or rather, my theme of how the Courage group coalesced. And what better way to do that than with a table and a map?

Thicko that I am, I’ve only just realised that a map – or series of maps – is the best way to demonstrate how the group was assembled. I’d been fairly certain that all Simonds acquisitions were West of London and the map confirms this.

They were very active in buying other breweries, with 17 purchases between 1930 and 1954. With the exception of the war, they averaged almost one a year. In doing so, they amassed quite an estate of tied houses. In 1896 they owned 158 pubs, but by 1916 that was already up to 316. When they were absorbed into the Courage group in 1960, their estate stood at around 1,200 pubs. Or around one-fifth of the later Courage estate.

Looking at the map, something immediately struck me: a similarity with the map of the Great Western Railway I have hanging over my telly. Simonds expansion until 1950 mostly followed the Great Western mainline from Reading out towards Wales. While in the 1950’s it was in the extreme Southwest of England, in Devon and Cornwall, another branch of the GWR. Coincidence? I suspect not.

You can see why they made a very attractive takeover target for anyone wanting a presence in the West Country and South Wales. To Courage, very much centred on London and the Southeast, they offered an easy route to total coverage of the South. When John Smiths was added in 1970, pretty much all of England was covered.

Like J W Green, Simonds seem to have run out of breath in the mid-1950’s and just coasted along for a few years until themselves being gobbled up. What was the reason? Personal? Financial? Or both? I’ll need to dig a bit deeper.

Being a Wheeler, being closely interested in Wheeler's Wycombe Breweries, and still living in Wycombe, I feel compelled to comment. Wheeler's got shot of the brewery in 1929 in a spasm of spite over the local council's tampering with licences, both existing licences and attempted applications for new houses. They seemed to have been rather proud of putting more than 70 brewery employees out of work and viewed it as teaching the local council a lesson. It was billed as a merger between Ashby's of Staines and Wheeler's, and I suspect that the Wheelers acquired a substantial shareholding in the joint company as a consequence of this, but it might have amounted to a takeover. Wheeler's willingly sold out and were the prime movers in this action, and they then buggered off to the Channel Islands. Within six months of this "merger" Simonds took over Ashbys. The number of pubs involved were up in the high 160s which is a huge number for a small market town such as Wycombe, but they had pubs scattered over a very wide area. Some of these pubs were leased from the Lords of the Manors, and may account for your figure of 148, because they probably did not count as true acquisitions.

The convoluted history of Wheeler's makes it very difficult to research because the surviving documentation is scattered over a number of locations; Buckinghamshire central archives at Aylesbury in which some of the documents are "sealed", for reasons that I don't understand and I have to get permission from someone to view and nobody seems to know who that someone is; Reading library archives; The Courage archives at their regional head office on the old Ashby's site at Staines, presumably now gone; one or two other ex-courage brewery sites as high probabilities and national Archives. So if you do stumble across anything interesting that is Wheeler related I would be much obliged if you make it known.